Émilie Pitoiset /Angélique Buisson
The search for wellbeing and personal development has become a survival goal in an ever-more individualistic society that, through “slimmed-down” methods of calling things into question and into form, finds the roads of the universal quest for happiness.
This second edition of Partitions (performances) explores methods of physical and psychological wellbeing through the hallucinatory deliria of Cynthia, the alter ego of artist Shana Moulton, as well as through the presentation of a new discipline, one that is scientific yet athletic: aquagymology, developed by the artists and researchers Clélia Barbut and Charlotte Hubert.
Shana Moulton / This organ wants this, that organ wants that
Shana Moulton creates situations inspired by the New Age movement and its personal improvement activities. Her videos oscillate from a beauty tutorial to a home shopping show to domestic art made up of objects from the realms of both kitch and technology.
In This organ wants this, that organ wants that, the artist presents a new episode in her series Whispering Pines, in which Cynthia, the artist’s alter ego, explores the possibilities of self-realization with the help of apparently trivial objects—electric blankets, humidifiers, office toys—“acting as portals” in Cynthia’s subconscious.
Shana Moulton lives and works near Yosemite, California. Over the past 15 years she has been developing her ongoing video/performance series Whispering Pines, in which she plays the role of « Cynthia », both a fictional figure and the artist’s alter ego. Moulton has had solo exhibitions or performances at MoMA, The New Museum, Performa 2009, The Kitchen, Electronic Arts Intermix, Art in General, SmackMellon, The Andy Warhol Museum, SFMOMA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Hammer Museum, MOCA Cleveland, The Wexner Center for the Arts, The Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Palais De Tokyo in Paris, The Migros Museum in Zurich, Kunsthaus Glarus, Fondazione Morra Greco in Naples and the Times Museum in Guangzhou. Moulton’s work has been reviewed in the Village Voice, Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times, Artnet Magazine, Frieze Magazine, Art Review, Artpress, Flash Art and The Fresno Bee. She is a featured artist at Electronic Arts Intermix and Art21.
Clélia Barbut and Charlotte Hubert / L’aquagymology
Aquagymology is a new scientific discipline created by Clélia Barbut and Charlotte Hubert. It aims to draw up an inventory of research on aquagym, since this practice has received very little attention in the academic literature. But it also aims to produce a science that does not exist. Starting with this incongruity, they not only create knowledge, but also stage it. Through the performance-lecture form, academic language informs bodies without gravity, while the abs and glutes infiltrate the lecturer’s stance. Professing from perineum makes it possible to give voice to the discreet chattering that accompanies aquagym courses, but it also to puts the disembodiment of scientific discourse to the test. The project is utopian.
It opens a world, in which it is difficult to distinguish academic speech from gossip, true from false, the scholarly from the anonymous. In which new ways of floating are invented. Over the past two years, aquagymology has been presented in various academic or art institutions (including Ecole du Louvre, Lille 3 University, PERFORM PERFORM Festival and ISELP).
Clélia Barbut is a sociologist and art historian working as a research associate at CERLIS (Paris Descartes University) and at the Art History and Criticism research unit (Rennes 2 University). Her research revolves around artistic performances, their archives and historiographies, as well as feminist epistemologies. Charlotte Hubert was born on March 27th 1984 at 7:55am in the Notre-Dame-de-Grâce clinic in Nantes. She lives in Paris and works everywhere on earth. She started making art because she kept losing at Monopoly. She tells stories, dances in Neapolitan nightclubs and observes Mount Fuji. In collaboration with Clélia Barbut, whom she met at the municipal pool, she created aquagymology. She is a visual-arts teaching fellow at Paris 8 University, offering a course entitled “I Am to Art What a Sardine Is to Oil”. Charlotte Hubert invents fictions without bursting out laughing, and regularly exhibits her work in an organized way in France and abroad.
